A Second Suffering: 2020 Hindsight

The importance of Fauci’s non-testimony this week cannot be overestimated. By revealing nothing, he revealed everything. 

Paul O’Brien | August 2, 2026

Ignoring the wisdom of Sophocles’ Chorus in Oedipus Rex to avoid “the double weight of past woes,” pondering 2020 has become my recent obsession. I am presently writing a novel and cannot, unfortunately, avoid revisiting the momentousness of that absurd year, and in this pursuit, as Oedipus did, I “suffer twice over” (so you won’t have to), trapped in a retrospective into a kind of madness. Many thoughtful readers no doubt plumb that awful annum’s depths from time to time, whether they like to or not. I pray it has not been with the ugly addiction that has held me in thrall for the better part of ten quarters. Like the proverbial trainwreck, it’s hard to look away.

Reflection has led me to conclude that 2020 should be remembered as “The Year of the Lie.” It has many brothers, of course, including especially its younger siblings, but has only one father. In retrospect, Old Scratch probably could have been Time’s “Person of the Year.”  It would have been more fitting, though, had Anthony Fauci, former director of NIAID, won the honors. It is no surprise to anyone who has objectively studied that year and lived through its aftermath that he recently “pled the 5th” more than 100 times (111, to be precise, according to Grok) before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

We need to be honest, though: Fauci had a lot of competition to be the Patron Saint of 2020. It was, after all, an election year. And, oh, what a tangled web they wove, indeed. It was a year when: (a) halting travel from China was nothing more than xenophobic and racist; (b) the virus was not airborne… and then it was; (c) masks wouldn’t work… but then N95s would, but needed to be rationed for hospital use only… until any mask might do, even cloth ones could work… and should even be recommended… er… become mandatory; (d) gathering at churches and gyms was dangerous, but protest-cum-rioting in the streets........

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